SciFi and Fantasy Book Club discussion

Has there been a substantial difference in the quality or format of Science Fiction being produced today - as compared to 10,20,30, etc. years ago? Positive or negative, what do you see as being an influencing or contributing factor(s).

The emergence of self-published authors must be counted as an important factor in the differences between past and present SF books. For one, there are now a lot more authors offering their wares to the readers, which is good in terms of selection choice. Also, those SPAs often have little to no editorial or publishing support. This may result in more bad grammar or typos, but it also means that the restraining influence of the traditional publishers, who decided what kind of books or which storylines would sell and then accordingly prune out potentially interesting authors, is now greatly diminished, which is a good thing. Overall quality of covers, text editing and so on may be a bit lower now because of the advent of the SPAs, but the readers have certainly won in terms of more variety.

Judging quality (grammatical analysis notwithstanding) is a tricky thing even when restricting comparison to contemporary writing, let alone between works of various eras.

For one thing, it's hard to get a handle on the overall product of a bygone era. SF from 40 years ago...we might well only remember the top 20% of popular releases and have absolutely no idea whatsoever of the other 80%.

And then you have to consider changing tastes. SF in the 70s tended to be more metaphysical, more social, more embracing of experimentation. But that was a very different time than now. The 50s and 60s were more steeped in cold war sentiments. The 40s were more enamored of the atomic era. Not off of that translates into 21st century consumer-driven, instant-access, totally wired, instant-gratification society.

So...I'm not sure anyone can truly say.

Personally, I see a LOT of rehashes of the same old stories out there. (How many Harry Potters, Hunger Games, sparkly vampire and sexy teen werewolf stories do we really need?) But is that any different than in the past? Perhaps on in quantity, as today anything can be published (and too often is).

But just looking at titles published by traditional publishers...I'd be guessing, but my hunch is that the quality is essentially as it always has been (not very high overall).

**shrug**

Writing trends as a whole are interesting.

As computers became more and more prevalent with word processing, books became longer and longer due to how fast fixes and edits could be made. Dune was a MASSIVE book for it's time but compared to pick your random epic fantasy it isn't that much at all.

Then with the internet everyone and anyone could self publish this lead to an explosion of self publication and in many ways the serialized style of the past is starting to return but not in zines but on the internet.

Why did you go to Harry Potter, Hunger Games, Twilight and not point at the granddaddy of getting ripped off LOTR?

I get in this argument with people all the time about everything, movies, kids shows, anime "it was better in the past", thankfully for things like movies/kids shows/anime it's pretty easy to pull up a listing every 5 years or so and just go back in time, and count how many "good" things there are. Normally it comes up that they like more things on average per year now then they do on average from the past, for the two primary reasons of exposure and culture shock. I honestly think story telling as a whole has improved overtime books less so then other mediums but still an improvement.

It's different, not better or worse.

You can't objectively rate two subjective qualities.

I agree with Micah, in that I'm not sure that the overall quality of the genre has changed much. Sturgeon's Law (90% of everything is crap) came about when he was trying to convince the publishing world that SF was no better or worse than any other genre.

I think that I might tend to glamorize the first years that I was reading SF- when I started reading scifi Heinlein, Herbert, Frederik Pohl, Asimov, Ellison, Octavia Butler and Asimov were in full production, there were quite a few 'science fiction' magazines that you could pick up at the neighbourhood bookstore every month (even in our small town) full of new short stories etc. But I worked in the Science Fiction/Fantasy department of our public library, and I know that I also read a lot of crap in that era- I just tend to think of the great books first.

I do think that there might have been more experimentation in the 60s-70s, certainly at least surrounding form and use of language, as well as 'story'. It's worth reading Dangerous Visions and Again, Dangerous Visions if you want to see how out there some authors got.

I do think that the push for diversity is helping the genre as a whole, although there certainly seem to be some growing pains. Even just growing up as a girl reading SF and not caring a lot (or noticing a lot) about gender issues, it was pretty blindingly obvious that a lot of SF was written for boys, by boys. That didn't really bother me too much, because it was just how the field was. My best friend was black, and I didn't even notice until she told me in our 20s that she'd never read an SF book with a black hero (let along a black female heroine). I think that the genre is becoming a lot more interesting the more voices we hear from people with different experiences of life.

As far as format goes I'm a fan of ebooks, until I've read and truly loved a book. A lot of the SF books that I've owned have had truly awful covers, that didn't always have a lot to do with the story inside. There were the very sexualized 'woman being menaced by an alien' covers, the almost soft-porn Heinlein red-haired woman covers, and way too many starscapes with a planet and a rocket ship on them. A lot of the covers I see now are much higher quality than they used to be. I love the cover for , , , etc. I know that book covers are more a science than an art now, but they're gorgeous, and still convey something about what's in the book.

The one huge complaint that I have about format now, especially in SF/Fantasy, is that I don't think that every idea should necessarily be a series. I know that it makes business sense for the publisher/author, but sometimes an idea or plot or characters just don't need 3 or 5 books. Some do- Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy is complex, and it didn't seem to suffer from being spread out over 3 books. I was very sad when Frank Herbert died, and while Dune could have stood very well on its own, I did love the other 5 books. I didn't need another 10 or 20 books in his world. I think that fantasy may be even more prone to that than SF is- I did love Robert Jordan for quite a while, and I still think that it would have made a great 6 book set. I'm still on the fence about A Song of Ice and Fire- I loved the first trilogy and I wouldn't cut a word of those, but I don't need two or three books of set up to get to another few books to finish it off.

Some authors do sequels/series well, I think. Dan Simmons didn't have to do the Endymion books, but I'm glad that he did. John Scalzi can keep writing Old Man's War books forever as far as I'm concerned, as he always does something a bit different with them. But I am getting tired of reading a book, and then finding out that it's the 'first of five!' I wish this trend away from single novels would just stop, unless there's a story/artistic reason to carry the novel forward.

Aaron wrote: "Why did you go to Harry Potter, Hunger Games, Twilight and not point at the granddaddy of getting ripped off LOTR?..."

'Cause that's old news. That's been going on since forever. Robert Jordan didn't invent ripping off LOTR! ];D

Micah wrote: "
'Cause that's old news. That's been going on since forever."

Terry Brooks *cough* *cough*

One of my sisters gave me the Sword of Shannarra for my 13th birthday, a few weeks after it was published. I was blown away- Dwarves, and Elves, and farmboy heroes, and magical Druids? Imagine my surprise when I read LOTR not too long after that :-)

Funny how people complain when an author 'somewhat' copies an old favorite (Tolkien for example), yet when one tries to be different, no one will even touch his or her books. In the end, the ones that copies become the most popular.

So let me ask, "What's wrong with people?"
You're damned if you do and damned if you don't.

I forgot to say that if I like a genre, I don't care if it's not entirely new. For a long time, favorite books were from Weiss and Hickman, which one could think they stole their idea from Tolkien. After all, they do have elves.

I enjoyed the Shannara series more then the Rings. But then, as a youth I wasn't a fan of travelogues, so...

Jen wrote: "The one huge complaint that I have about format now, especially in SF/Fantasy, is that I don't think that every idea should necessarily be a series..."

Ha!

[sarcasm]
But didn't you know that a series proves you're a serious author?
[/sarcasm]

I'm not sure they make a lot of sense for writers who don't have a steady following. I see way too many SPA's pump out 5+ books in short order, rushing through them like it was a race...when actually they would have been much better served by focusing on writing ONE book well.

Who's going to suffer through all 147 parts of an endless series when book 1 sounds like a reject from a grade school slush pile?

OTOH, I've seen a good fair number of poorly written, barely edited books in top selling slots on amazon. So, who am I to judge?

James wrote: "I enjoyed the Shannara series more then the Rings. But then, as a youth I wasn't a fan of travelogues, so..."

Me neither. LOTR was the only one I could read. Any other I tried after that bored me to death and not because I found LOTR so marvelous. It was good only because it was different. I enjoyed the Shannara series and the Dragonlance series a lot more than LOTR.

G.G. wrote: " I enjoyed the Shannara series and the Dragonlance series a lot more than LOTR. "

Garret Jax (pardon the spelling) means more to me then SuchAndSuch the Human Hunter Guy does. And I remember crying over a certain Flinty dwarf's death, right along with his hairy-footed friend.

G.G. wrote: "Funny how people complain when an author 'somewhat' copies an old favorite (Tolkien for example), yet when one tries to be different, no one will even touch his or her books. In the end, the ones t..."

Yeah, but you're talking about two different groups of "fans". If your goal is to please everyone, then you will always and evermore be frustrated.

G.G. wrote: "So let me ask, "What's wrong with people?"
You're damned if you do and damned if you don't..."

Don't look at me, I gave up on fantasy after Tolkien (it was a done genre after that) and started reading Philip K. Dick. It was a wee bit different. ];>

One trend I'm sure everyone has noticed, and one that I really quite despise, is the seeming inability of authors today to write a standalone book. I actually have to go out of my way, dig, and research to find new standalone books. It's so frustrating. A series better be bloody mind-blowing AMAZING if you expect me to wade through 5, 10, 12, 20 book, with each weighing in at 500-1000 pages!!!

And over the years I've found that the books that I'm reading are becoming increasingly older...meaning I've revisiting the decades when authors would actually tell a story with one reasonably sized novel.

See my chart of books I've take the time to rate here on GR...you can see me visiting books of the past much more often.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/pub_...

Somethin' good, somethin' bad... a bit of both.

It's hard to judge overall quality, because I can't read enough. I seem to be encountering the same ratio of 1-star and 5-star books as I ever did. There's certainly more choice than there was 40 years ago. Back then, even the biggest bookstores only had a couple shelves dedicated to SFF. Now they have entire sections.

As far as the "everything's a series now!" complaint, to me it feels the same as when people complain that every movie is a remake or sequel. That's just someone who hasn't been around long enough to see this is how it's always been.

There are more series now, but that's just because there are more books. Percentage-wise, it's pretty much still the same. After all, back in the 1970s and 80s I read Asimov's Foundation and Robot series, Chalker's Well World, Diamond and Dancing Gods series, Foster's Commonwealth series, Herbert's Dune series, McCaffrey's Pern series, Kurtz's Deryni series, May's Pliocene series, Drake's Hammer's Slammers series, Niven's various Known Space series....

I could go on, but you take my point.

I read those 70s and 80s series too but they were standouts as series. The norm was the single novel. Nowadays, the norm seems to be at minimum a trilogy. It's a fad. With the worst aspect being that authors purposely begin a book knowing it's one of a series and end it on a cliffhanger. I feel cheated every time I accidentally read one of those. Is it too much to ask that my book have a beginning, middle and end?

Fabi wrote: "Is it too much to ask that my book have a beginning, middle and end? "

If a writer doesn't give a beginning, middle and end to the story and simply chops it at a cliffhanger, for book 2... that's a crap writer.

Stop reading those writers.

Lol good advice

Fabi wrote: "I read those 70s and 80s series too but they were standouts as series. The norm was the single novel. Nowadays, the norm seems to be at minimum a trilogy. It's a fad. With the worst aspect being..."

Without doing a comprehensive overview, I don't see how you can make that claim. Standalone Fantasy has always been rare. Is there a classic SF author whose output wasn't comprised of at least half their books being part of a series? If there are, I would guess they're rare.

Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Herbert... maybe Bradbury's percentage was lower, but a lot of his stories belong to one series or another. It seems only the guys with low output had few series, like Sturgeon or Tenn. There's probably someone I'm forgetting, but people overlook a lot of series from the past.

Faulkner wrote a series of stories and novels in Yoknapatawpha County.

Hemingway wrote the Nick Adams stories which, taken together, tell a man's journey through life.

Edgar Rice Burroughs had, by Goodreads' count, 7 series. And Tarzan counts at 26 books long.

Conan Doyle had at least 2 continuing characters (I like Prof Challenger).

Alexandre Dumas wrote in series.

Etc, etc.. And serialized print stories were probably more common 100 years ago, then today. Television has taken over that trend. But it was already there, in radio and magazine and newspaper serials.

The stories told about King Arthur and his knights weren't all one tale, they were a series of different tales, telling an over-arching myth.

I'm just pulling stuff from my memory. I'm sure some searching would pull up so many more. It's not a new trend and it makes complete sense. There's comfort in the familiar. People seek series for the same reason they seek genre: it's something they know and are comfortable with.

There is also the factor of how much the writer has to say as part of a story. If it would take you, say, 1200 or more pages to say everything you want to say in a story/book, how many people today would be ready to read such massive books? Would you voluntarily cut out parts of what you think is essential to the story, just to make the book length manageable for the average reader? Some authors (I'm looking at you, David Weber) just keep on producing books in a series apparently to milk the most money out of it, but others simply have a lot to say. James was right about the old authors being as prone to writing series as modern ones, and that is because they had something to say.

Trike wrote: "Is there a classic SF author whose output wasn't comprised of at least half their books being part of a series?..."

Philip K. Dick for one. Heinlein, Robert Seckley, Stanislaw Lem...

Many other well known authors who did do series (Joe Haldeman, Frank Herbert, and Greg Bear come readily to mind) at least wrote books in series that were complete stories. Their series were more like standalone books set in the same universe/history with maybe some of the same main characters, or not, rather than endless Tad Williams, Robert Jordon, or GRRM one-book-in-five-or-more-bricks format.

Alastair Reynolds and Iain M. Banks wrote/have written many books in the same universe, but each book being essentially standalone. I personally like that. It gives you a varied look at their world creation from different perspectives, time periods, and characters. Even Herbert's Dune was largely like that because each novel was from a different time, some from radically different POVs.

You're not suckered into continuing just because, what the hell I've already sunk X number of hours into it so I might as well find out what happens in the end.

What I dislike (and don't read much of) are ones that carry on one story across more than three novels when the story just doesn't demand it. Even Peter F. Hamilton, who I really like usually, did this with his Night's Dawn series. Way too much exposition on non-plot relevant things.

Perhaps it's simply a matter of taste, but I prefer the classics over the current crop of science fiction writers.

I'll tell you the difference. The science is missing today. I just read The Martian and I loved it and it was like a breath of fresh air to get some actual science in the book. It seems to me that today's authors don't seem to have the knowledge or bother to research the subject about which they are writing. I'm not saying there aren't any but in the past it seemed to be a priority. Today there seems to be a whole lot of fantasy mixed into the science. It's as if the authors got their science from Hollywood.

I don't mind futuristic gadgets, but I would appreciate it if the author didn't violate his own rules regarding how they work.

If you'd like to dispute this point, please list some new (or newer) authors publishing hard science, because I want to read them.

I won't comment on whether the trend of writing a series of books is new or old. I don't really care. I don't like them. As many here have said, I'm ok with a series as long as each book is a full complete story. But if a series runs long it eventually will become something different than what attracted me to the first book.

I also don't really care how long a book is. I think a book should be as long or as short as it needs to be to get the job done. That said, I think there should be a reason for every chapter. I have read books that I later thought, hmmmm, he could have cut three useless chapters out of this one. I hope this adds to the discussion.

Russell wrote: "I'll tell you the difference. The science is missing today. I just read The Martian and I loved it and it was like a breath of fresh air to get some actual science in the book."

I agree about The Martian, but this is the same issue as "too many series today", I think. There's never been much real science in SF. The books we remember are the ones that have stood the test of time, but during that time it was a rarity to run across something one could call Hard Science Fiction. It's always been a minor subset.

I have only just started to read this thread, and would like to add my comments.
I have been reading and collecting Sci fi / fantasy for mmm, over 50 yrs. I have some books that are falling apart as I bought them as second hand way back.
My collection is about 700 bks, because every year I slowly go through them ( as I read a lot of new stuff) and I mark in my databank the ones that no longer hold my interest .
All I can say is that some are still good 50 / 40/ 30 yrs on. Others were removed after the 2nd reading check ( probably 3 yrs later). Many of the older ones present technology incorrectly compared to what really happened, but often this doesn’t matter as the concepts and the way the story is told is fantastic.
It’s like classic books in general some survive over time others don’t. eg Shakespeare, Jane Austin, and so on.
But isn’t that the point, we all like a different style of book, what I call a classic and will never throw away( my complete set of Asimov) others find too out of date to read. I was happy to let Eddings go!!! Just re read Stephen Donaldson and loved it all over again. Yet finding my collection of Janny Wurts very slow going.

Russell wrote: " It seems to me that today's authors don't seem to have the knowledge or bother to research the subject about which they are writing. I'm not saying there aren't any but in the past it seemed to be a priority. "

I think you'll find that the majority of science fiction writers are non-scientists, both then and now. What you are describing is your experience in reading.

Russell wrote: "I'll tell you the difference. The science is missing today. I just read The Martian and I loved it and it was like a breath of fresh air to get some actual science in the book. It seems to me th..."

I agree in a way. It is not so much the hard science, which was quite limited, but rather logic and consistency, as well as properly working out the consequences of any particular piece of "science" that is introduced, or worse still assuming that things will still work they way they do in the present (e.g. cell phones or TV sets).

Perhaps it's true that it's no different now than it was then, but I can name a few from 'then' and I can't name more than one from 'now'.

All sci-fi has some measure of false or questionable science, but it just seems to me that the authors tried harder to get it right. It seems like these days authors embrace the lack of science and just put essentially fantasy in place of the science and move along. I don't like that. Assimov, Clarke, Fredrick Pohl, Gregory Benford, Frank Herbert, C.J. Cherryh all had plausible, well thought out science in their books. These days Joe Haldeman is about as close as it gets and he has some pretty questionable science in his books.

To be clear, I don't have a problem with a teleporter in a story. That's sci-fi, probably not hard sci-fi, but sci-fi. What I do have a problem with, is the protagonist's car breaking down with no plausible explanation as to why he's driving a car instead of using the teleporter. I'm looking at you Star Trek.

Maybe it's just me, but it just seems like things just aren't thought through as much before the words are put to paper. . . err. . .put to electrons.

Asimov had plausible science? Faster than light travel, nuclear power plants you can hold in your hand, mind control, group consciousness that even includes the minds of rocks and rivers, people who can power an electric grid using only their mind (and can probably throw fireballs), completely-intelligent robots who live for tens of thousands of years, planets completely encased in domes, alien three-way sex, time travel and reality manipulation, unutterable powers breeding humans as a form of penicillin... let's not get carried away here, Asimov was not exactly Hard Science!


What I will agree with is that Asimov had a great deal of curiosity and intellect, and was always willing to think about, explore and describe his macguffins, no matter how absurd they were. I think that's probably what you don't see so much of.

---

More generally, the impression I get is that you don't tend to have the same level of structural experimentation that you used to. On the other hand, the quality of prose may actually have gone up.

Ok...I think I understand what's happening from reading this thread. As noted by Wastrel and as I thought before I begin reading this, older science fiction books were not all better than now but it's the same syndrome as when one person dies that's happening.

How many times you might have heard someone in your family badmouthing Uncle Joe, or Aunt Jane, but after they died, they suddenly became perfect.

Books are the same. We read them and loved them and as the years go by, we forget that although we loved those books, they still had flaws.

So when we read today's books, we compare them to what we remember, not the flaws but the good stuff we loved.

G.G. wrote: "Ok...I think I understand what's happening from reading this thread. As noted by Wastrel and as I thought before I begin reading this, older science fiction books were not all better than now but i..."

I agree with that. I grew up reading the books we now call classics, but some of them are hard to wade through now. I think the writers today are as good as ever, but it's so easy to publish now you have to dig deep through the bad stuff to find the good. As with any consumer product, you have to spend time on it, and even do a little research, to find something that you're happy with.

Wastrel wrote: "Asimov had plausible science? Faster than light travel, nuclear power plants you can hold in your hand, mind control, group consciousness that even includes the minds of rocks and rivers, people wh..."

Perhaps he wasn't a good example. I read quite a bit of Assimov's actual science books, plus I believe that the laws of robotics qualify as well thought out. But it's been a long time since I read foundation.

I think your second paragraph more accurately captures my sentiment.

Now that I've had time to think about it, and maybe I'm picky here, but if someone uses for instance a teleporter, I chalk that up as science fiction. But when someone uses a torch in outer space to cut a hole in the side of a ship and the molten metal "runs down the side" I just consider it wrong. And yes, I see the irony here. But I guess the difference here is, while teleportation doesn't seem very plausible, IF it did exist, we really don't know what it would be like. But we DO know that there is no down on a spacecraft in a 'weightless' environment.

Another example was a person who wrote about star fighters attaching meteors to their ships to go undetected by enemy sensors. I can forgive the fact that the sensors can sense the ships but not the 'meteors'. I can forgive the fact that they actually had bailing wire, velcro or whatever to attach them to their ships (not really). I can even forgive the fact that these objects are typically many miles apart and not closely clustered as is often portrayed, but what I couldn't forgive is that a meteor is a shooting star. A meteoroid is found in space and a meteorite is the left-over bit found on the planet after impact. If you are going to write about them. . . learn about them.

It may be that when I read many of these science fiction books and I feel I learned a lot from them, I was a kid. Now that I am an engineer, I can see the flaws, I couldn't back then.

What do you think?

@Russell

In general I agree, it's logical breaks and just straight up mistakes that drive me a bit nuts. Authors write what they know what I'm looking for is a good story I will enjoy. Most authors don't really know science, and if they do it's flimsy at best and it will certainly NOT hit on everything that they will be using. Don't forget how many times programming/hacking is brought up in books/movies the only times I have seen it done right has been 2 times in a fantasy world where magic was like programming, most of the time it's done so hilariously wrong it's an actual running joke/trope now.

The worst to me is when I'm reading competence porn, and they make terrible decision after terrible decision but because they are the main character it just all works out and of course they were right.

Russell wrote: "Assimov, Clarke, Fredrick Pohl, Gregory Benford, Frank Herbert, C.J. Cherryh all had plausible, well thought out science in their books. These days Joe Haldeman is about as close as it gets..."

And Greg Bear and Alastair Reynolds and David Brin and Stephen Baxter and Peter F. Hamilton and Ken MacLeod and Neal Stephenson and William Gibson and...

All of them have some fantastical stuff in them, but so do Asimov, Heinlein, Herbert (hive minds? wonder drugs that extend life, allow FTL travel, turn people into human computers...and kill you...all at the same time?), and most of the "classic" SF authors.

In fact, when I look at the contemporaries I read, I really don't see much internally inconsistent world building at all.

I think the issue is likely to be what you're chosing to read rather than there being a lacking of such writers today.

And as pointed out, there were a LOT of non-science stuff out there. The 60s and 70s were littered with a lot of metaphysical strangeness in SF (which personally I love).

I actually understand and agree with what Russell is saying. There are books that I read so long ago but still stand out in my mind because I find parallels or similarities in today's technology/society from what was, when written, pure fantasy.

I remember the cards used in 1984 for a person's money and identification. There are also many examples of video calls and portable/wearable computing devices in past sci/fi.

I still prefer sci fi that takes current research and expands it with imagination to what it could become.

Give a great writer a starting point and let their imagination create a world that is scarily plausible and that gives me my favorite type of reading.

I don't run across these types of books as often any more. I am always so happy when I do. Could they be categorized in other genres now? I am thinking of Daniel Suarez's Daemon. Is it even classified as sci fi? It contains the pseudo science element I'm referring to and that I believe Russell was talking about.

Fabi wrote: "I actually understand and agree with what Russell is saying. There are books that I read so long ago but still stand out in my mind because I find parallels or similarities in today's technology/s..."

Thanks. That is what I'm saying.

And Micah is correct as well. I look for Hard Science fiction and a lot of times when I find some, 8 out of 10 don't interest me.

Some books going from memory that strike me as qualifying in my vaguely "plausible science" category are Footfall, Timescape, Dune, 2001. Yes each of these could be laughed off, atomic bomb powered space ship, time travel, levitation devices and superhuman space jumping? What? Yet, somehow they were just more believable.

Star Trek (and don't get me wrong, I do love Star Trek), has a completely inconsistent world. Once you can recreate someone from a pattern buffer and beam a different version of them onto the ship, you've cured all diseases and episodes involving that should fall away. You can have a field day with that.

I guess this is why I'm so excited about The Martian, because, while there are some physics errors, it's much closer to the target than I've found from most books these days.

Thanks for the Daemon reference. I'll check it out.

I do find a lot of reader especially younger readers are afraid of reading anything from last century due to the outdated technologies and social issues.

That is true. I recommended my favorite book Gateway to a friend and his wife and they hated it. In the book, the protagonist has sessions with his psychiatrist periodically and at one point he beat up his girlfriend and never even apologized for it.

I didn't remember any of that. I just remember thinking it was cool that they were getting on ships and didn't know where they were going or if they had enough supplies to get there before they died. I had completely blocked all of the social issue stuff, of which I'm sure there was more, out of my mind.

So maybe it is me, but I still hold by my central theme. I'd like to see more real science in my science fiction and I'd like to see more internally consistent worlds. That's basically it.

Tannera wrote: "I access viable resources when writing science fiction. Aside from accessing and reading published articles, NASA.com, astronomy.com, plus numerous technology feeds, I also contact astronomers and ..."

I do too.

Send me a message with what you have written. I'd like to check it out.

One thing I don't miss from some of the old books from the 50s/60s/70s is the ideologically-tainted stuff (either anti-communist or anti-capitalist rants) that was found with some authors, who wrote stories to praise the virtues of what they believed to be THE superior political system (European writers were bad for that). Racist rants were also more common than now (probably because they are not tolerated anymore today). The one thing I appreciate in modern books is that women can be the main heroes and are not anymore simply sexy fluff put in for the enjoyment of the (male) characters. I certainly can't remember a SF book from the 50s/60s were the main hero was a woman. Can anyone name such a book?

Here's what's happening:

"The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers"

Replace "children" with "science fiction". In either case, it wasn't true then and it's not true now.

But the fact that this is a quote from Aristophanes, from 423 BC... it's either not true or children in his time were truly pure and angelic.

Ahhhh... the good old days.

Michel wrote: "I certainly can't remember a SF book from the 50s/60s where the main hero was a woman. Can anyone name such a book?"

Shadow on the Hearth by Judith Merril. Domestic post-apocalyptic fiction. And if I recall correctly, Planet of Exile by Ursula K. Le Guin half-fits this criteria with two protagonists, one male and one female.

Daemon for one of the missing links.
Thank you for everyone who took the time to post the books and authors as links, really appreciate it!

Russell wrote: "Perhaps it's true that it's no different now than it was then, but I can name a few from 'then' and I can't name more than one from 'now'."

That's not SF's problem, though, it's yours, because you haven't been reading the right books.

Stross, Doctorow, Wilson, Nagata, Carlson, Suarez, Latner, among others, are all new(ish) authors who have written hard SF in the past decade.

And that's not even counting the "old guard" who are still working: Bear, Vinge, Steele, Egan, Baxter, Brin, Mixon, Gibson, Slonczewski, etc.

Russell wrote: "All sci-fi has some measure of false or questionable science, but it just seems to me that the authors tried harder to get it right. It seems like these days authors embrace the lack of science and just put essentially fantasy in place of the science and move along. I don't like that. Assimov, Clarke, Fredrick Pohl, Gregory Benford, Frank Herbert, C.J. Cherryh all had plausible, well thought out science in their books."

In SOME of their books. Frank Herbert wrote maybe one Hard SF book in his life. Anyone who claims Dune is Hard SF is off their nut. Giant worms (biologically impossible) which live on a planet with a single ecosystem (unlikely) converting sand into a drug (maybe) that allows humans to "fold space" and have other psychic powers? No. No way. We know that stuff is impossible, and he knew it when he was writing the book.

Asimov and Cheryh have just as many books where they completely make stuff up as they do books where they worked out the rules of their world, and even in those they had bald-faced impossibilities. Foundation? Nope.

The real problem is that you're granting the guys you read as a kid a bye into Hard SF that they don't deserve, while ignoring the new writers who are actually writing Hard SF.

Thanks for the list. I'll check them out. Strange that this list isn't in the Hard Sci-fi thread.

So it's concluded then. The quality now is exactly the same as it was. Right?