weird how all the popular fiction right now is post apocalyptic huh wonder why
i actually had this talk with some friends the other day: people don’t see a better world as possible anymore merely trying to find some semblance of peace sifting through the ashes and that is 100% reflected in the stories we tell
This is a tired point to make, but popular fiction is usually about making manifest the contradictions and anxieties of the time it was written in by dislocating them in time and seeing how they play out.
What do you mean? My favorite subreddit, HumanityFuckYeah, keeps pumping out quality literature on the most epic of pogroms. If anything, it’s more sci-fi now that half of it is written by AI!
The last time I looked it was mostly fantasy isekai harem slop, with users treating it as like a chapter by chapter web publishing thing except it’s reddit posts lmao.
I didn’t realize they were doing harem slop (I’ve never looked at anything but a few directly linked threads) but I guess it makes sense. It sounds like a trashy shounen manga publication (or perhaps that type of seinen that’s really still just meant for teenagers) where you don’t even need to be decent at highly procedural drawing.
Where’s the polycule slop that I want? Where’s the story where the protagonist has like 5 girlfriends but they each also have their own other partners and the whole thing is really about scheduling with a bit of drama sprinkled in here and there, where’s that?
I think that’s just Watanare, although I don’t know where it goes past the first season of the anime because I haven’t read it, nor watched the movie/5-episode continuation.
At least some of it, I think. I’d gone and looked at it again after the thread about the youtube videos that were just AI gibberish stories either lifted from old r/hfy posts or themed after them, and saw a lot of like “Going to a Magic School as a Human in Another World Where There Are Catgirls Chapter 63” (I made this title up because I can’t remember the exact one, but I’m riffing on a specific one that was really close to that) sort of posts. Even morbid curiosity couldn’t get me more than a few skimmed paragraphs in, between how terrible the writing was and also the fact that that was the actual length of those “chapters” lmao.
I assume there is still some of the old style sci-fi stuff too, but it felt like it had largely shifted away from the old one-off short story form “empty slop to trip up certain emotions relating to fear, pride, loss, and accomplishment” to serialized “empty wish fulfillment escapism” slop. I think I even saw a post complaining about exactly that change in the content lmao.
It sounds like a trashy shounen manga publication
It’s like the jankiest, lowest grade imitation of LN web publishing you could imagine. Like I think there are comparable English sites for doing chapter by chapter publishing for webnovels, although they may be less popular than that sort of thing is in Japan, but “a subreddit where you post like 500 word chapters several times a week” is just the worst medium for it.
I couldn’t help myself, and went and looked again. Here are some highlights of the titles from the past week:
- Everyone’s a Catgirl! Ch. 332: Rice to the Occasion
- Oops! I Accidentally Started an Industrial Revolution in Another World (24/?)
- [Brian The Isekai] - Chapter 27: Staff Time
- [Reverse Isekai] A Ninja from 1582 gets stuck in modern Tokyo.
- The Villainess Is An SS+ Rank Adventurer: Chapter 486
- There Will Be Scritches Pt.219
- Villains Don’t Date Heroes! 3-25: I Hate Being Right
- How I Helped My Smokin’ Hot Alien Girlfriend Conquer the Empire 2-71: Pre-Ass Kicking Checklist
- How I Helped My Demon Princess Conquer Hell 27: A Promise To A Pretty Girl
- Why isekai high schoolers as heroes when you can isekai delta force instead? (Arcane Exfil Chapter 61)
- Wearing Power Armor to a Magic School (158/?)
I do see a lot of titles that sound like sci-fi, but it’s a pretty even mix of that and what are clearly fantasy, and there’s a bunch of obvious isekais too. A lot of the ones I listed showed up multiple times, too, and three of them are from the same author. I’m assuming a fair bit of it is AI word vomit too, but I really don’t want to fry my brain by looking any closer.
That really is just an impressive volume of cookie-cutter trash. I do have some sympathy for reverse isekai though.
On the other hand, horror just keeps growing. My local bookstore has three massive shelves for horror and only one and a half for sci-fi. Fantasy has slightly more than horror.
optimistic SF was killed by 9/11
Optimistic SF died with the Soviet Union. Cyberpunk is the only future reality now, atleast for Americans.
We’re not even gonna get cyberpunk, we’re gonna get children of men from global ecological collapses and microplastics and shit. We’re so cooked
That’s the end game for cyberpunk as well. All Cyberpunk worlds I’ve seen are heavily polluted undergoing ecological collapse.
Best case is Wall-E but the fat blob people are very racist
Nah, 9/11 killed the detached and enui filled stories from gen x office workers about how boring and fake and easy their lives were like The Matrix (1999) and Fight Club (1999). After that it either got cheesy/didactic/preachy/patriotic like Transformers/AVP/iRobot or Dark and Edgy like The Bourne Trilogy, Dark Knight, Children of Men, etc.
Utopian scifi was long dead at this point, Star Trek was killed with the Soviet Union.
Star Trek was killed with the Soviet Union.
I dunno, Ds9 is really popular and highly regarded.
Star Trek Deep Space Nine Runtime : January 3, 1993, to June 2, 1999
It was good but not utopian at any point and if i get a dollar for every time i heard “latinum” there i would have more dollars than i ever had.
DS9 is also not utopian or the same tone as the originals
Hollywood has never really liked portraying aliens as benevolent beings.
Arrival was pretty good on this, one of the only I can think of
It is hard to find good scifi books, an it only gets harder as you keep reading more.
Have you tried Children of Time?
I tried! Oh, Lord, how I did try.
Seconded, fascinating and optimistic series!
I love how much empathy and cooperation is emphasized as the books progress
I was going to say this, that author seems to be big right now.
I find I tend to stick the authors I’ve liked before. There are a few people writing really solid sci-fi, and I haven’t read through all their books yet. For example, I just discovered that Greg Egan published Morphotrophic in 2024. Going to be my next read.
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That would just reduce my content pool even more.
How’s Chinese SciFi?
I haven’t read much personally but 3 Body Problem and it’s sequels are amazing, best hard sci fi in decades
Thanks, I’ll check it out! I’ve heard it mentioned I didn’t realize it was from China.
Actually since it’s a translation anyway maybe I’ll go for the Spanish edition and work on my Spanish lol
Dark Forest my beloved
They keep giving movie deals to Liu Cixin, it ain’t pretty
Sci-fi or speculative fiction?
This article just seems to be focusing on “science as magic” stuff… which I think of as “fantasy stories where there’s space ships instead of dragons”. Which, makes sense with the successes of the Game of Thrones and Twilight franchises. Publishers are going to green light more manuscripts with supernatural critters to get horny over and sword swinging hack and slash renfaire setpieces that might have dragons.
My experience that it’s been increasingly difficult to find any sort of hard sci-fi.
