Science Fiction and the Far Future

[chriswight]

Why is it that no decent scifi authors have the kahones to take a stab at a story with a far-future setting? Is it because technology (and thus society) are evolving too quick to accurately predict?

 

Traditionally science fiction was our preview to the future, but (in my opinion) good scifi these days never strays beyond a few easily-predictable extrapolations of current social trends.

 

Comments and contrary opinions are welcome!

 

CW

 

PS - sorry if this is the wrong category for this thread.

[Buffy]

It depends on what you mean by "far future." It seems to me that there's plenty of SciFi that is not at all rooted to "future of Earth," its just about people in a different place and time (e.g. Star Wars). As such, its undefinedly far in the future.

 

If what you're really talking about is "so far in the future that we would not recognize ourselves" then the issue becomes, you'd be talking about beings so different there'd be no way to relate:

Zdchpz transitioned into full awake sleep from light sleep. He wiped the silicon ooze from the connectors on his omnibody and reattached his head, as Zdchnn and FRdnd detached themselves from his brain stem and slid across to the dimensional incubator to chop their newly grown appendages into a thousand pieces to reproduce today's offspring. He teleported to the colony's outer chamber and connected his 82 tentacles into the communications array and began sending signals to the colony on Pppunnf as it absorbed the a new alien civilization in a surreptitions microscopic infiltration of their precious bodily fluids

How much of this kind of drivel could even dedicated SciFi fans take?

 

The nature of drama is that the reader must be able to relate to it. If it gets to far from ones own experience, its boring. That's why so much SciFi is "about us": bipedal, good-looking, sex-starved, war mongering creatures. More concretely though, SciFi by definition is some sort of reasonable extrapolation of the known world, and if you go the level described above it will at the very least go into Fantasy even if it is coherent, and I'd argue that Fantasy is *still* something that's very grounded in our own experience.

 

You can find out more about someone by talking than by listening, :shrug:

Buffy

[chriswight]

OK, to be clear, is there any good scifi out there set in the future of, say, a few hundred years from now? Close enough so that 21st century people could relate, but future enough so almost anything is game.

 

I guess my thinking is that in decades past scifi writers seem to have a pretty good handle on where the technology of the day might take humanity in a half century and beyond, but these days they don't.

[Buffy]

I'll admit that I'm not really that big of a SciFi fan, and I actually personally gravitate to "near future" works, but heck, all of Star Trek is 200-400 years out, and it seems like *most* SciFi is actually out that far. In my book, its actually not that much different than what people predict for 40-50 years out, because there's a limit on what most people can extrapolate ("the truth as always will be far stranger"), and writers just seem to have different ideas about *when* the breakthroughs will happen.

 

What differences do you see in these two time frames?

 

Precognitively,

Buffy

[Tormod]

Why is it that no decent scifi authors have the kahones to take a stab at a story with a far-future setting? Is it because technology (and thus society) are evolving too quick to accurately predict?

 

I don't get it...I read tons of science fiction about the far future.

 

Read, for example, Stephen Baxter's Destiny's Children series. The final two books are set in the FAR, far future. I think a third one is emerging. Likewise his Manifold series touches upon the far future, and the book Evolution ends with a chilling glimpse of the far future.

 

Peter Hamilton's Night's Dawn trilogy is set within the next thousand years. It includes a timeline from "our time" so that technological trends can be followed. His Commonwealth saga is similarly timed although it is completely different in scope.

 

Alastair Reynold's Revelation Space series is set in the far future as well, although it has fewer obvious relations to modern times (but there are connecting short stories around).

[Tormod]

I forgot Richard Hamilton's Takeshi Kovacs books: Altered Carbon, Broken Angels, and Woken Furies - they are all set in a future that starts about 500 years from now.

[chriswight]

Awesome. Thanks for the advice! I'll check them out.

[Zythryn]

Best science fiction that covers the far future?

 

Isaac Asimov, The Foundation series. If that is too far in the future for you, he has written a whole gob of books between the near future and the far distant future of that same 'universe'.

[chriswight]

Yeah, I read most of Asimov's sci-fi back in college, including the Foundation series (even the sequels), which was really good. I like the concept of psycho-history, especially since I had an interest in history at the time.

 

What I was really looking for was something more recent.

 

In the thread "Current Science Fiction = Future Science Fact?" Kelddath writes:

 

Modern sci-fi (cyberpunk, neocyberpunk) talks about things that are not so far away, and you could easily draw parallels with the things that already exist. Star trek(star wars) is more a pop sci-fi, then anything else, made for masses...

 

I tend to agree with him, though admittedly I haven't checked out any recent sci-fi, so I'll check Tormod's suggestions.

[TheFaithfulStone]

There's Orion's Arm, which is an online world building exercise set in 8,000 or so. It's pretty wild actually - it's as crazy as I think you could predict and still be remotely related.

 

TFS

[Jay-qu]

I think it doesnt matter how far in the future it is set.. Foundation is an exellent read, it is some many thousands of years into the future, while a series like halo is a mere 500 years into the future but they have a similar level of technology.

 

It all depends on the writer.

[chriswight]

Wow... crazy is an understatement. I read the primer to Orion's Arm, and it is (pardon the pun) out of this world.

 

Fascinating, though. And certainly thought-provoking. Civilizations controlled by AI entities that can create or destroy worlds with a thought?

 

I'd have to agree with Buffy's statement:

If (drama) gets to far from ones own experience, its boring. That's why so much SciFi is "about us": bipedal, good-looking, sex-starved, war mongering creatures.

 

Makes me wonder if technologies like AI and genetics will get so totally out of control in the future. But I suppose that's a topic for another thread.

 

:shrug:

[haloman]

If I get what you are saying it is that you want to find a author that is accurate at thinking of technology in the future? There isn't going to be one probably be one you said "OK, to be clear, is there any good scifi out there set in the future of, say, a few hundred years from now? " but if you took a car to the revilutionary war most likely no one will have ever thought of it.

[CraigD]

Clarke’s 1956 novel “The City and the Stars” is set billions of years in the future, and involves a pair of human-made, god-like entities, one childlike, one viscously insane.

 

Poul Anderson’s 1970 novel “Tau Zero” involves the crew of a spaceship witnessing the “big crunch” at the end of a closed universe, at least 50 billion years in the future if such is actually the fate of the universe, then waiting to reenter normal time at about the universe present after-the-big-bang age of about 14 billion years.

 

I read a novel around 1990, the title and author of which I can’t recall, set in the era following the extinction of the last stars, about 10^14 (100 trillion) years in the future.

 

I believe that “deep time” is, while not one of the most frequent science fiction plots, far from rare.