Me and my friend the telepathic dog went for a walk through the post-apocalyptic wasteland...

[daibhidc]

The following appeared in this month's Ansible:

AS OTHERS SEE US. An unusual analysis of sf trends: 'One way you can
describe the collapse of the idea of the future is the collapse of
science fiction. Now it's either about technology that doesn't work or
about technology that's used in bad ways. The anthology of the top
twenty-five sci-fi stories in 1970 was, like, "Me and my friend the
robot went for a walk on the moon," and in 2008 it was, like, "The
galaxy is run by a fundamentalist Islamic confederacy and there are
people who are hunting planets and killing them for fun."' (PayPal
cofounder Peter Thiel, profiled in _The New Yorker_, 28 November 2011)

Naturally, because it's the sort of thing I do, it occured to me to look up the "anthology of the top
sci-fi stories in 1970", which I'm taking as being The World's Best Science Fiction: 1970, even though there are only thirteen stories in it. I'm not sure these stories entirely fit Thiel's paradigm...

Comments

[rhiannon-s.livejournal.com]

Nah, the paradigm right now is "The galxay is run by an all seeing military autocracy, who like to tell us about the evil-stand in for-Islam-menace it is protecting us from because they are evulz, and personal freedom is how the evil-SIFI-menace will destroy us" because the military is always right. It's equally split between the writers who fervently believe that is right and we should be allowed to commit horrendous warcrimes and Judge Dredd style antics, and those who are rightly sending up the whole thing as bullshit.

Actual theocratic menaces were a few years ago.

[scarfman]

I think his overall point is a valid one though. Science fiction has gone mainstream, and mainstream is about contemporary tensions instead of about sense of wonder.

[rhiannon-s.livejournal.com]

I think Sci-fi has always reflected mainstream stuff. In the fifties and sixties the mainstream worried about commies, but also had this technological optimism, so you got stories like "a boy and his robot" stuff, but also invaders from planet-x. In the 70s it was cold war and environmental concerns, so we got superb post apocalyptic stuff and saw a decline in tech is our friend and helps us expand to the stars, type stories. In the eighties, it was cold war and greed is good. Result, cyberpunk with super tech spies. Then the nineties...well I was drunk through most of them, so I dunno, there was probably something, possibly drunken, aimless teens, like me.

And now, it's the post-9/11, post-Soviet era where Mil-tech is god, but insidious beyond even the commie-scare of the 50s and 60s infiltrators. Add in a bit of post US-Empire decline anxiety for the next decade or two and we'll be back to the same sort of tensions that were coming out in the thirties and forties with the decline of the British Empire.