What has happened to all of the good Science FICTION writers?

[Jojo999]

You might also want to take a look here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mundane_science_fiction

as well at some of the links....

That would be just too mundane for me...

As for no good SF writers left, I question such a statement in its raw form. I would think anyones ability to make such a pronouncement would heavily depend on how many authors/books they are aware of and have read.

I've been reading SF for many years (surely over a thousand books), yet I still have a list of authors and books fugitively as long as my arm to read. I'll probably die before I get to everything I want to read, which is as it should be.

 

[nightdreamer]

A lot of discussion here on what is science fiction and what is fantasy. To my mind, science fiction requires that science be essential to the plot. The original The Outer Limits was (mostly) solid sci-fi. Star Trek was a mix. Taking any old story and changing the setting by putting it on a space ship or replacing swords with blasters or light sabers does not make it science fiction. Star Wars is fantasy. You could stick it alongside Conan the Barbarian and replace starships and with boats and tauntauns with camels and hardly touch the story. The Force is just magic. It's a standard fantasy quest in a different setting, perhaps what the original poster meant by science fantasy.

 

[j d worthington]

A lot of discussion here on what is science fiction and what is fantasy. To my mind, science fiction requires that science be essential to the plot. The original The Outer Limits was (mostly) solid sci-fi. Star Trek was a mix. Taking any old story and changing the setting by putting it on a space ship or replacing swords with blasters or light sabers does not make it science fiction. Star Wars is fantasy. You could stick it alongside Conan the Barbarian and replace starships and with boats and tauntauns with camels and hardly touch the story. The Force is just magic. It's a standard fantasy quest in a different setting, perhaps what the original poster meant by science fantasy.

The problem with that is that if you actually look at the history of the genre, you will find a rather large number of fundamental classics of the field which contradict that assessment, from Wells' The Time Machine (or even, really, The War of the Worlds, when you get down to it), to Kuttner & Moore's "The Children's Hour", "Mimsy Were the Borogoves", and "Vintage Season", to Sturgeon's More Than Human, Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land (or even Beyond This Horizon), nearly anything by Ballard, Fred Brown's "Arena", Kornbluth's "The Little Black Bag", Clarke's "The Nine Billion Names of God", Asimov's "Eyes Do More than See"... the list goes on and on and on. In many, many stories where "science is essential to the plot", you still end up with something which is much more, rationalistically speaking, in the fantasy camp than in that of science fiction:Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz, for instance, or Asimov's "The Last Question" or "The Ugly Little Boy", Heinlein's "Waldo", and so on.

The fact is that sf is an outgrowth of the much older and much broader literary field of fantasy*; it is speculation usually (though not always) based in a scientific or at least pseudo-scientific premise and with a more-or-less rationalistic frame of reference behind it... but beyond that, the two fields are really much closer together than the adherents of one or the other tend to want to believe... which is why, through the bulk of its history, sf and fantasy have walked not only side-by-side together, but often half-and-half in the same tale.

*Once again, I feel I need to remind people that the "standard fantasy quest" is only one very, very tiny facet of the immensely broad category of fantasy itself, despite its current vogue as the idea of what constitutes the genre.

 

[dask]

Science fiction is more flexible than many people give it credit for. There are many types of sf and hard sf is only one of them.

 

[j d worthington]

Science fiction is more flexible than many people give it credit for. There are many types of sf and hard sf is only one of them.

Eeeyup. SF, too, is a much broader genre than the current view would indicate. Just look at the history of the genre; or what has won awards (Hugos or Nebulas, let alone the Jules Verne Prix); or what editors, critics, and literary historians or analysts (several of which have written the stuff themselves, such as Anthony Boucher, Damon Knight, Joanna Russ, and so on) have classified as sf.

The current, more restrictive view, though dating at least as far back as when Stephen Whitfield wrote his The Making of Star Trek (casting sf in a favorable light, and fantasy in an unfavorable one, at least by implication, via the phraseology) is not supported by the evidence... which is one of the many reasons why it has proven impossible to have a definition of "science-fiction" on which much of anyone can agree.....

 

[hitmouse]

Other currently working British writers of great quality (perhaps not vomiting up pulp-quantity product, but still) I think not previously mentioned:
Christopher Priest
M John Harrison
Michael Moorcock
Jeff Noon
China Mieville
(and JG Ballard who died quite recently)

These may not be Walmart-fodder in N. Dakota, but I would not write off modern SF on that basis. In fact there is a SF bookshop in a fashionable part of Vancouver (liberal, cosmopolitan, with good dentists), where the girl behind the counter has not heard of Jack Vance. One may have to look a bit further ie Amazon.

I would also point the seeker to some quality TV SF writing, namely the last few series of Doctor Who and Torchwood (last series excepted), Firefly, and Battlestar Galactica. It may be TV, but the writing is literate and very good.

And don't forget non-European fare. Try Studio Ghibli.

 

[nightdreamer]

... impossible to have a definition of "science-fiction" on which much of anyone can agree.....

Pretty much came to that conclusion myself. I've pondered this point long enough that I eventually wrote an entry in my newly established blog about it. http://duane.duane-n-lisa.net/wordpress/?p=32

 

[io_anonimus]

Sci-Fi seems to me to be about the PLAUSIBLE in the future.

From my part I cannot make a distinction between Sci-Fan, and Sci-Fi so for me is Scie-F… All the books with some science inside are of this genre. Books about dragons and magic are only fantasy.
Even Star Wars, discussed before, is Sci-Fi, not because of the fancy swords but because of holography and interstellar communication, the famous Lea message, and the dystopian future which can be plausible between others. Predicting a political future is as much scientific as predicting technology. Politology is also a science.
Also what can be considered an interesting prediction now can be viewed in a different perspective in several or tens of years.
For example Asimov books about robots and foundation are classical but I can say that for the predictions part all of them are a failure. I cannot see any future based on the ideas derived from the respective books. That doesn’t diminish my pleasure of reading them again when I have time to spare.